I am apparantly above average in the number of books I have read on this list.
Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Copy and paste into a note of your own. Delete my answers.
2) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
3) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE and
to the ones you HATE.
4) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
5) Tally your total at the bottom.
6) Put in a note with your total in the subject
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen - x
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling x+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee x+
6 The Bible – x +
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier x+
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger x+
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame x
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis x
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen x
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini x
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres *
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne x
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell x
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery x +
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood x
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding x
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel x+
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon x+
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tart
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold x
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas *
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville *
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens *
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hudgson Burnett x +
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens x+
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom x+
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle *
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint Exupery x
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute x+++
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas *
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo x (read it in French when I lived in France, but a condensed version, but I count it because it was in French)
Totals:
Read- 35
Not Read- 65
Plan to Read- 7

Doesn’t the BBC think people went to high school? I have read 19 books on the list and 7 of them were in HS. There’s one more I was supposed to read and didn’t and there are at least a dozen that I remember my friends in different classes reading. I think anyone that went to school and did a reasonable amount of work has read at least 6 of these books. Also, what’s up with counting the whole Harry Potter series as one book? That’s like 15 gazillion pages!
I don’t know how high on your list to read The Count of Monte Cristo is, but you should move it to the top. It is SO good. I also recommend Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which isn’t on your list. Happy reading!
By: Ellie on March 10, 2009
at 12:44 pm
Hi Sheridan. I have read 33 of the 100 books. I’ve started several others on the list but abandoned them due to disinterest. In contrast to your friend Ellie’s comment, I think where you went to HS matters. I have always leaned toward literature and English classes, yet I read surprisingly few of those books in HS. I second her recommendation for Tess, but also recommend Far From the Madding Crowd which is my personal favorite of Thomas Hardy.
By: Brenda on March 11, 2009
at 3:38 pm